جغرافیای زیستی و توسعه اقتصادی بلند مدت

The article models the transition from a hunter–gatherer economy to agricultural production, a crucial event in history which made possible the endogenous technological progress that ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution. We further present evidence showing that geographic and initial biogeographic conditions exerted decisive influence on the location and timing of transitions to sedentary agriculture, to complex social organization and, eventually, to modern industrial production. Evidence from a large cross-section of countries indicates that the effects of geography and biogeography on contemporary levels of economic development are remarkably strong, a result that contrasts with several recent studies where the effect runs solely through institutions.

During recent years, there has been an increasing awareness that geography affects economic development and growth. For instance, temperature, disease environment, and conditions for transport have been shown to influence agricultural productivity directly (Bloom and Sachs, 1998; Sachs, 2001). Geographical factors are also believed to have played an indirect role by setting the basic conditions in which social institutions are formed (Acemoglu et al., 2001; Easterly and Levine, 2003) and by defining environmental constraints to population growth (Kremer, 1993; Galor and Weil, 2000). The argument made in this paper is that biogeography had a fundamental impact on economic development already in prehistory. Favorable biogeographic initial conditions – in particular the prevalence of plants and animals suited to domestication – expedited the transition from hunter–gatherer to sedentary agriculture in advantaged areas, leading to the rise of early “civilization” and conferring a development head start of thousands of years over areas less well endowed. In our model of long-run economic development, we show that the impact of this head start should still be detectable in the contemporary international distribution of prosperity. Empirical evidence from a large cross-section of countries supports this hypothesis.

Archaeological and related evidence strongly suggests that the timing and location of transitions from hunting and gathering to horticulture and animal husbandry were decisively affected by the biogeographic endowments of various regions of the world in prehistory. This historical observation is a key feature of our stylized model of economic growth and development. In our model biogeographic productive potentials drive transitions to sedentary agriculture, which in turn make possible the formation of a non-food producing class of knowledge creators whose activities fuel endogenous technological progress and rapid population growth. Due to Malthusian forces, output per capita remains at subsistence level until the industrial stage is reached. The model implies that the earlier the transition from hunter–gatherer to agricultural production, the longer the period of endogenous growth of knowledge, the earlier the transition to industrial production, and the higher the level of economic development – even in the present day.